Posts Tagged ‘Julie Harris’

Between the playpen and the frozen vegetables? Not.

We missed June 27, the official day Shirley Jackson‘s “The Lottery” takes place.  It’s a counterpart to Bloomsday earlier in the month, on June 16.  You know the story:  In a small-time American town, citizens gather every year to implore an unnamed force to grant a good corn harvest. The citizens draw slips of paper from a wooden box to select a victim for human sacrifice. A young mother draws the losing card, and is stoned to death by the community.  The end.

Hundreds of letters poured into the New Yorker when it was first published in 1948.  What did the story mean?  According to her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.”

That’s not quite true.  She told the San Francisco Chronicle a month after the story was published:  “Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And how was the story written?  According to Jackson, speaking at a lecture, “I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft.”

The single change was a request from the  New Yorker editor who reviewed the first draft, who asked “that the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course.”

That’s not quite true, either.  William Brennan‘s article in Slate, which came out last month in time for Lottery Day, corrects the record, after he made a trip to the Library of Congress, which holds Jackson’s records.  You can read the list of his discoveries in “How Shirley Jackson Wrote ‘The Lottery'” here.

Here’s something I didn’t know.  Jackson wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted in the Robert Wise film The Haunting, with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom.  Scared the bejeebers out of me when I was an imaginative little kid. I’ve refused to go to horror movies ever since.

Almost all little girls have a love affair with horses. They also seem to go through a Joan of Arc phase, too. I was indifferent to the equestrian sports – but I read all the books in my library on the illiterate virgin from Domrémy who gave birth to a nation.

So I was pleased to learn in my online peregrinations that today is her 600th birthday.  How the experts have determined her birthday when we’re not even sure of the year she was born, I can’t remember, if I ever knew.  The picture at right was made about half a century after her death; the only contemporary portrait made of her has not survived.

She may be a powerful reminder that events can be successful without turning out quite as we imagined.  Charles VII, the king whose coronation she engineered, appears to have been a truly nasty piece of work.  Having recently attended the exhibition of The Mourners at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, I enriched my appreciation for what a first-class creep he was:  “the mourners” adorn the tomb of John the Fearless, done in by the king-to-be in a particularly treacherous way.  Old habits die hard:  he did nothing more than a decade later to save his warrior and savior when she was captured by the Burgundians.  She burned at the stake in 1431.

We know her, not only as a warrior, patriot, and saint, but also as the heroine of two great plays:  Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, and Jean Anouilh‘s The Lark.

The most famous passage from Shaw’s play follows her agreement to sign a confession renouncing her “voices,” to live under permanent confinement.

“You think that life is nothing but not being dead? It is not the bread and water I fear. I can live on bread. It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again climb the hills. To make me breathe foul damp darkness, without these things I cannot live. And by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your council is of the devil.”

Below is a 1957 Hallmark video of the play, starring that remarkable and generally underrated actress Julie Harris as Joan and the better known, for different reasons, Boris Karloff as Pierre Cauchon.  Lillian Hellman made the English adaptation and Leonard Bernstein composed the incidental music. (Otherwise you could watch Carl Dreyer‘s reverential and acclaimed The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I have always found a little like watching paint dry. Guess I’m a lowbrow.

I haven’t had a chance to watch the whole Anouilh play, but it looks pretty good in the bits I’ve seen. You’ll have to skip through Hallmark’s 2-minute cheesy commercial at the beginning, and a very blurry video version – but Harris is worth it, I think.